Investigating the structure of regional innovation system research through keyword co-occurrence and social network analysis

Research on regional innovation systems (RIS) has evolved into a widely used analytical framework generating the empirical foundation for innovation policy making. The purpose of this research is to shed light on network-based author keyword analysis by integrating social network analysis and bibliometric analysis on the development of RIS research. A total of 432 papers belonging to 36 countries, 276 research institutes, and comprising 1165 keywords, are retrieved from the Web of Science databases for network construction and analysis. The obtained network in this study is capable of providing visual and quantitative insights into the publication trends or knowledge evolution of RIS. Network actors chosen in this study include country, research institute, first author, and keywords. These constitute four types of networks defined in this study: three research focus parallelship (REP) networks (REP-country network, REP-institute network, REP-author network) and one keyword co-occurrence (KCO) network.